sysinstall, GJOURNAL and ZFS

[Nick Barkas]

On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 04:57:30PM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote:
> > UFS2+SoftUpdates works fine on properly configured UFS2 - and very fast.
> Yes, UFS2+SoftUpdates is very fast, however, in the case of a power
> loss or having to pull the plug on a locked up system, it has a
> noticeably higher chance of leaving you with an unbootable system than
> if you were using Linux with ext3/ext4 or Windows with NTFS.

Can you back this up? I cannot recall having ever rendered a FreeBSD
system unbootable due to UFS/UFS2 problems after a power failure or
crash. I once had a problem with snapshots that made background fsck
fail and crash the system, but it was fixable by booting single user and
running fsck manually. This was a couple of years ago, and I think the
problem has since been fixed.

ZFS at least probably is not able to replace UFS2 for everyone, at this
time, anyway. Perhaps gjournal can be a replacement for softupdates for
many people who do still need UFS2, but I'm not sure. I think in any
case, any existing bugs that cause UFS2+softupdates to catastrophically
fail in the event of power failures or system crashes need to be fixed.
Making it easier for users to install a system with ZFS or gjournal does
nothing for those who have existing systems with UFS2+softupdates, and
those who cannot use ZFS or gjournal in the near future for whatever
reason.

That being said, I do agree that being able to support ZFS and gjournal
in sysinstall or an alternative installer would be great. 

Nick